Eli Attia's patent vs Google - Vannevar

The patent filed in 2008 describes automated design, fabrication, and construction management. Basically, you input a CAD drawing and it figures out what parts to cut how in the shop, which are quickly assembled in the field. Now, Mr Bausk feels this is an idea and not a method -- only methods are supposed to be patentable. Mr Attia names his system "Engineered Architecture" and calls it "ea" for short.

Figures from the patent application

Anyhow, the patent documents include expected savings from this new system, about 44%. The patent includes several pages of budget numbers, which claim an accuracy to the nearest $1 -- on numbers as large as $163,381,991.

This may point to the source of that $120 billion revenue number touted by the media:

Start with the claimed $37 million/building in construction and financing savings

Multiply by lots of buildings

Take the contruction management cut.

Bingo: you end up with $120 billion! I can see how Mr Attia figured he had hit the gold mine through Google X's interest, and then Vennevar forming to commericalized his idea. Sad it's gone sour.

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Back in 2006, I was at a party at Joel Orr's house in Mountain View, and I spent quite a bit of time talking with Eli about some of the concepts that appear to be at the heart of his patent.

When it comes to "tall buildings" Eli knows whereof he speaks. From his bio at Huffington Post: "As head of his own New York firm, Eli Attia Architects, and earlier as Chief of Design for Philip Johnson, Eli designed several internationally-recognized buildings that have been critically acknowledged as instrumental in redefining the modern skyscraper."

They say it's not bragging if you've done it. Eli has done it.

In our conversation, I found the way that Eli decomposes a the process of creating building to be reminiscent of how really good software architects decompose their systems.

While his 2009 patent application probably looks, on the surface, like an "idea and not a method," you might need to read the 8 subsequent patent applications to start to get a sense of what he's really getting at.

I'm afraid I have to revise my previous comments on EA. EA is not even an original idea. What has been presented both in the patent and in the speech is painfully trivial.

Claiming that every famous building in the world can be designed and engineered using EA while benefitting from that is fallacious. The only actual idea that can be distilled from EA is "all buildings are essentially the same except for the form, let's predesign a generic structure that can alter its form according to some geometric rules, keeping the form as geometry-y as possible". That is a blatant oversimplification of the trade.

BTW, it has been done almost to the letter in the countries of the Soviet block (using exactly the same reasoning of urbanization, population density and economy), the result being that recognizable life-crushing "sleeper suburb" environment that had crippled my own (and thousands of other people's) abilities to create and interpret true beauty and stir feelings - the true purpose of architecture as an art.

On top of that, architecture has little to nothing to do with software design (namely the type paradigm), regardless of that the CAD/BIM industry would like to believe otherwise. Sure, there is a crisis in architecture, exacerbated by digital technology, that people try to overcome with same digital technology (resulting in what is known as generative design, contemporary architecture, blobitecture etc.), but that will be over some day.